Bruce Lehrmann should be forced to cover millions of dollars in legal fees for Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson because he lost, and because he rejected an offer to drop his defamation case and walk away in August last year, Ten has argued.

The former Liberal staffer, who has been found by a Federal Court judge to have raped Brittany Higgins in a Parliament House office, lost his high-profile case against Ten and Wilkinson last week. He had sued over an episode of The Project that aired in February 2021 that interviewed Ms Higgins about her then-alleged rape.